Double-Barrel Read Online Free PDF Page B

hold him for. He had upheld vehemently that there was no truth in any of the suggestions.
    He was one of the few men to have had letters.
    â€˜Do you think that nobody knows about the book of photographs in the locked bookcase? Your wife would be interested. Perhaps I will tell everybody. You would get an enthusiastic reception on Sunday then.’ He had not told the wife. He had done nothing. He had not understood why his wife should have acted strangely. He had disregarded the letter as a ridiculous untruth from someone evidently insane.
    Why keep it?
    To show the police in case there were more.
    Had it never occurred to him that his wife might also have had letters?
    No, it hadn’t, unhappily.
    Had he been afraid to draw attention to the suggestion? Was it true?
    The wife’s were much the same as Betty’s. ‘If you do not want the scandal to ring through the whole country, you must follow the instructions you will receive implicitly.’
    Had she? Had anything happened? Was it all just wish-fulfilment?
    The other suicide – wife of the manager of the milk-productsbusiness – had left no letters. It was only an assumption that she had had any.
    I rather thought she had. The husband had acted rather queerly, to my mind.
    Police actions had been based on mutual acquaintance. What persons had been in contact with all these others? Remarkably many. None of them remotely suggestive. Whose telephone to tap, whose house to watch? Every idea had petered out.
    The whole affair had been kept from the public – but a lot was certainly known. And the public reacted. That large number of respectable wives who had got tetchy with each other in public. That quite violently heated audience for a rather scruffy café where on two occasions – meaning two had been proved – a woman had done a decidedly daring strip-tease. Who knew what went on in a small town? Everything was known, and nothing.
    Everything could be seen. The Dutch, especially the more provincial Dutch, do not draw their curtains even at night. There are many explanations of this; I have always thought it due to anxiety – the Dutch neurosis. The anxiety lest anyone thinks us not normal, not conforming, not ‘respectable’.
    â€˜We have nothing to hide,’ announce those curtains.
    Hadn’t they? Nothing?
    There is a favourite Dutch pastime that they call ‘shadow-watching’. Everybody in Zwinderen does it, I have noticed already. As the name implies, it is an evening occupation, towards twilight. You sit by your own open curtains, one lamp in your room lit, and you observe.
    Every home has huge windows, front and back. Walls are paper thin. There is almost nothing one can do that is not seen and heard instantly – and as for flats … This could be called a typical small-town provincial crime. And given a mildly deranged person, two a penny anywhere, you arrived with unpleasant ease at multiple death. Which, howeverprovincial, is as frightening, as horrid, as difficult to stop, as worrying to authority, as the classic psychopath multiple murderer of cities – Jack the Ripper, Franz Becker, and all the other textbook cases. What was the difference between knifing a prostitute, strangling a child, and badgering a housewife into insanity or suicide?
    People died, didn’t they?
    Resolutely, I shut the file, with its thick supplement of police conclusions. These were really pretty inept. I reach inept conclusions too, but I try not to let other people read them. There is the written report that is intelligent, and there is the written report that at least sounds intelligent.
    Example of ineptitude: a reference in one letter to ‘eleven tomorrow’. An annotation put the illuminating query, ‘Is this a Saturday?’ Meaning that if the writer was an employed person, Saturday would be his only free morning.
    Ve-r-y helpful.
    Further down they had all worked on the assumption that